


The Wisdom of Weaving

by YesBothWays



Series: Love is a Quest [14]
Category: Xena: Warrior Princess
Genre: F/F, Feminism, Femslash, Greek myth - Freeform, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-02
Updated: 2015-05-02
Packaged: 2018-03-26 17:19:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3858625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YesBothWays/pseuds/YesBothWays
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a poem from Gabrielle's perspective</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wisdom of Weaving

I made it a punch line, I recall, when I was younger

And so much less wise myself, that Athena, the Goddess

Of Wisdom and Just Warfare was less known as the

Goddess of Weaving. A silly, domestic craft, I thought it.

I would not honor such with the title of an art for I knew

The arts demanded one's life, love, passion – one's heroism.

 

Women back in my childhood village, every autumn,

Would braid staffs of wheat together into wreaths after

It had been cut and dried in great stacks in our barns.

Plain and dusty, they hung on doorways and inside houses.

They spoke of the commonest beauties – of our safety

And abundance. We needed to see and not just taste it.

 

I left that place searching for sweeter tastes and also,

I knew even then, tastes far more bitter to the soul.

I thought I would go to find beauty far greater and truer.

I would live and die as an artist, my own form of a hero.

Instead of a husband and a set of children, a little thatch

Of goats and chickens, I would love a warrior woman.

 

I wonder if you still recall now that time when a princess

Wove some of the hair in your horse's tail into braids?

I thought then of the wreaths in my village when I saw

Those mislaid ornaments. They looked so right to me

Somehow. And, I swear, she stood proudly to display

Her coast, just the color of wheat, as I now clearly saw.

 

My people today, the Amazons, are still strong in the South

And East where the mountains protect them from attack.

There's a place there called the Valley of a Thousand Thousands,

Where so many different wildflowers grow all together that,

Like the stars, they cannot be numbered. Amazons brought them

Over many years, as gifts to bees they keep as honey-makers.

 

I tasted that honey once, from a small jar of plain, red clay.

No poem has been written that can capture that taste

Made from so much life accumulated and woven in amber.

The life of the Amazon sisterhood, their country, their bees

Dances on the tongue, not just the mind, to tell a story of such

Truth and such beauty, one tastes an essence beyond words.

 

A wildfire once swept through that sacred valley, they say,

And Amazon sisters came on quests throughout the world,

Seeking sweetness to bring back home for their kin, who both

Waited and worked for the return of the abundance of the Valley.

Whatever they gathered together in exile, they brought home

And shared even to the far reaches of the Amazonian sisterhood.

 

As a child, I learned a saying among Greeks that Amazon boots

Are always dirty. Now I know they are coated with clay.

They mix the seeds of beautiful, useful plants with it, and

Shed them wherever they set foot, in their own lands and

Well beyond. Those who think as I did once cannot see

The gift Amazons bring and shed lightly as soil from a boot.

 

The first time I placed a single braid into your black hair

I held it in my mind as a joke, as my hands began the work.

I thought that it would look misplaced when I finished, but

You looked more yourself in that way a change can make.

I knew even when young that what we love determines

Who will we become. I thought it strange that you loved me.

 

By the time I reached for a lock of our hair as casually as

A lover puts a hand to the body she is often entangled in,

I had grown in my wisdom and the vision gifted both to

Poets and to Amazon Queens. That symbol of weaving

No longer brought to my mind a weak or idle habit. I

Thought instead, it fit with your passion and resilience.

 

Over the years, I have watched you take up the threads

Of your feelings and re-work them, integrate them all,

Until free of past rending and the discord of dropped threads.

I used to try to tell your story as I saw it unfolding, but I

Had to learn to see it aright. I wrote our villain, driven only

By hatred. You told me, hers was a love story underneath.

 

I see Penelope now at her loom at what I once imagined

As the drudgery of un-weaving and see a woman un-writing

A story of her husband dead and suitors murdering her son.

No one else was telling that story in Ithaca, save Penelope.

I wove her into my telling of the story in her right place,

Although I rarely find the chance to tell any story so old.

 

The people want a hero alive and well and still among them.

And for years now, we have been moving in and among the

Listeners to create a hero's story interwoven with their own.

I had a shallow mind to see the Wisdom in Weaving, back

When I did not even know how to see much strength in myself.

Today, I prize that feminine, domestic art, even above Just War.


End file.
